Academic Crises, The Breakdown of our Educational System

The Academic Creed
in Theory and Practice

Dr. Paul Trout, Professor Emeritus Department of English

Montana State University, Bozeman, Montana

Ed. Note: The Foundation is very disturbed about why a man with 
apparently very little integrity, is considered a national icon, 
and has a holiday named for him. There are a large number of 
black men who deserve greater recognition than this man.

The Plagiarism of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

One notorious plagiarism case--involving, sadly, Martin Luther 
King, Jr.--illustrates that some professors not only ignore 
plagiarism but excuse it.

In 1991 a panel of scholars at Boston University (BU) ruled that 
Dr. King plagiarized parts of his 1952 doctoral dissertation at 
BU by "appropriating material from sources not explicitly 
credited in notes, or mistakenly credited, or credited generally 
and at some distance in the text from a close paraphrase or 
verbatim quotation." A careful analysis of King's dissertation 
by Theodore Pappas revealed that over sixty percent was copied 
from an earlier dissertation. Clayborne Carson, director of the 
Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project, and professor of history 
at Stanford University, found additionally that King's student 
essays and published and unpublished addresses and essays all 
contain "numerous instances of plagiarism and, more generally, 
textual appropriation."

When the charges became public, some professors--both black and 
white--rushed to palliate or deny King's wrongdoing. The most 
bald-faced effort came from the Acting President of Boston 
University (October 1990): "Dr. King's dissertation has, in 
fact, been scrupulously examined and reexamined by 
scholars...Not a single instance of plagiarism of any sort has 
been identified" (in Pappas Plagiarism 68). Taking a similar 
tack, the committee of BU academics found "no blatancy" in the 
plagiarism despite the fact that King appropriated page after 
page from other works.

Others tried to palliate the offense by saying it was the result 
of "carelessness" (despite the fact that King had taken a 
graduate course in thesis writing). A few, like Keith D. Miller, 
an English professor at Arizona State University, notoriously 
argued that King merely had drawn on the oral traditions of the 
black church in which "voice merging"--the blending of the words 
and ideas of those who spoke before--is commonplace.

A somewhat conflicted Professor Carson went further, describing 
King's "pattern of unacknowledged appropriation of words and 
ideas," which he does label "plagiarism," as a "legitimate 
utilization of political, philosophical, and literary texts" 
that allowed King "to express his ideas effectively using the 
words of others" via a "successful composition method." And 
Professor George McLean praised King's plagiarized dissertation 
as "a contribution in scholarship for which his doctorate was 
richly deserved" (in Pappas "Life and Times" 43). As Theodore 
Pappas points out, to say that [King's] doctorate was "richly 
deserved" when 66 percent of his dissertation was plagiarized is 
"absurd and dishonest" (Ibid.).

But "absurdity" and "dishonesty" now often trump adherence to 
the academic creed. When confronted with irrefutable proof of 
plagiarism, what did many notable scholars do? In the words of 
Jacob Neusner, Distinguished Research Professor of Religious 
Studies at the University of South Florida:

They lied, they told half-truths, they made up fables, they did 
everything they could but address facts; three enlightened 
individuals even threatened [Pappas's] life. In the face of 
their own university's rules against plagiarism, Boston 
University's academic authorities and professors somehow found 
excuses for King's plagiarism.

They found extenuating circumstances, they reworded matters to 
make them sound less dreadful, they compromised their own 
university's integrity and the rules supposedly enforced to 
defend and protect the process of learning and the consequent 
degrees. They called into question the very standing of the 
university as a place where cheating is penalized and 
misrepresentation condemned (in Pappas, I 1).

http://whitestonefoundation.org/BibleResearch/Academic%20Crisis/
Plagiarism-MLK.html
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